


Honesty and the Upside-Down

by pinstripedJackalope



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Clones, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Experimental Style, Gen, Hurt Keith (Voltron), In a way, Keith (Voltron) is a Mess, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Keith is their compass, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess, Lance (Voltron)-centric, Langst, Mythology References, Operation Kuron (Voltron), POV Lance (Voltron), Psychological Horror, The rest of the crew is also there, This is an alternative to season 5ish, but like, but like it's even more pronounced here, but like self-aware langst, i really don't know how to tag this, me: posts voltron fic like its 2017, that's canon, those are the important people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24318889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: Lance hasn't felt right since Keith left Voltron for the Blades.  He's been puzzling and puzzling--what does it all mean?  What does Keith and his actions really, really mean?
Relationships: Keith & Lance (Voltron), Lance & Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 59





	Honesty and the Upside-Down

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this in my drafts for a long ass time. I must have started writing it around season 4? Season 5? In any case it's weird, and hard to follow, but I think it's pretty good. Hope you like it!

If Lance is honest, and he very rarely is, it’s not easy to wipe the memory of Keith from the castle walls. Oh sure, there’s always something to do—deals with the devil to make, new Altean weaponry to master, bots to reprogram with a few good friends… you know, that kind of stuff. But it’s like no matter what he does, no matter how far he goes, he’s still walking a prophecy made by one old coot of a teacher who had one _hell_ of a grudge.

The thing with Lotor, for instance. Lance sighs, scrubbing his hand down his face. He’s in his bedroom, lying in a heap on the floor, having just tripped over one of the many, many, _many_ cables Pidge helped him rig up to power the video game console from the space mall. Lotor. Ugh, _Lotor_. He can hardly think the guy’s name without coming across memories of foggy red gloom, the Black Lion floating listless in the air ahead of him, Keith’s shaking voice on the comms saying, “ _I followed him right into this trap_.”

And the thing with the sword. He’s delighted that he’s getting so far in his training, and of course the sword wasn’t _Keith_ _’s_ sword, but… the Red Bayard so readily took the form of a blade for both of the Red Paladins before him, you know? He’s just following a tradition, following in footsteps that are light and surefooted and he knows he’s too large, too unbalanced, too weighted in the wrong direction to understand what a blade truly means. At least, not yet. He doesn’t feel ready.

He breathes deeply in, deeply out, forcing the air from his lungs until it feels like the insides of his chest are scraping together. Keith was ready. Keith was ready for anything—everything. Ready to jump into action at less than a moment’s notice, no qualms about feeling the rush of instinct and channeling it through himself. The only thing that caught Keith off guard was _silence_. 

So… yeah. Lance thinks about him an awful lot for somebody who tries to take every day as a new opportunity and forge onward despite the fact that he would KILL for some time off and a good backrub. Even in Galra central command, nursing his mildly concussed head and a not-quite-popsicle as he watched their sentry friend (may he rest in peace) shoot off into space, he couldn’t stop wondering what kind of expression Keith would have made.

Which is dumb. He’s dumb. Okay no, not really—his daily dose of honesty is going to have to stretch a little farther today because he’s too exhausted to come up with a good distraction. He’s not dumb, he’s jealous, only he’s not that either, it’s…

He struggles. His mouth opens and closes, and he scrunches his eyes closed, and he sifts through a waterfall of English and then Spanish and then the smattering of Latin he picked up from his sister, and he still can’t come up with the right word. How do you say ‘I wanted to absorb his piloting skills after being pitted against him for so long that it felt unreal but then I got to know him and now his pain is my pain, except not in an empathy kind of way, more of like a he-ran-and-I’m-still-here kind of way’? 

The Germans would know. They have a word for everything.

He wants to laugh. He thinks Iverson cursed him to always be watching Keith’s back as he walked away, but that was probably Keith’s doing, as well. Keith knocking over dominoes with a closed fist, like he always does. Lance heard rumors once upon a time that Keith was the reason Iverson is blind in one eye.

God, he’s tired. Tired to his bones. Can malcontent sap the strength from your muscles? Is this how Keith felt when he was lost in the desert, chasing something that amounted to little more than a vibration in his chest cavity?

“Lance!” calls a voice. “If you want some of that Taujeerian mush you’d better come out soon!”

Fine. He rolls over, hoists himself to his elbows, and pushes thoughts of a former Paladin from his head for the hundredth time. The voice has called him out and they know it—he would do anything for that mush. He just hopes no one asks him anything too mentally strenuous, because he’s not sure what would come out of his mouth in response.

He hasn’t seen Keith in months. He hasn’t seen Keith in months, and there’s something wrong with Shiro, and he doesn’t know what to do. _My head_ , Shiro keeps saying, and without Keith’s laser focus and unerring instincts about their Black Paladin, Lance has no idea what it means.

It isn’t until after Allura debriefs them on the Lion in the Sky and the Temple Sacrifice (Indiana Jones and the time a mystical white lion nearly killed them all, more like) that Lance figures out that maybe, just maybe, a lack of Keith means just as much as a presence of Keith.

It’s a jumbled sort of thought, and it comes to him when he’s in the middle of milking Kaltenecker. He is a little embarrassed to admit that he pulled back too fast and accidentally squirted himself in the face with milk. That doesn’t stop him from mulling over it for the next seven hours straight.

What does it _mean_ when Keith turns his gaze elsewhere? Well, aside from the fact that it feels like a nonsense riddle from a mystical being (were they sphinxes who did the riddle thing?) that would have a non-answer as an answer, the literal response here is… there is something more important in another direction. Keith navigates directly. He turns toward the largest threat, the biggest movement, the most direct course of action. It was the trait that got them in the most trouble when he was still trying to get a hold on piloting the Black Lion—he couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and he didn’t like the trees telling him so.

 _Think_ , Lance, _think_! Thinking like Keith is giving him a headache, but he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something important here. Hunk would tell him that he’s fixating again, that he just needs to let Keith go, but why? What did Keith see at the Blade of Marmora that they could not? Why was Keith, the one who fought the hardest to keep them together for so long despite his rep as the loner ( _everyone in the universe has a family_ ), so easily called in a different direction?

Lance feels like he’s walking in circles. There’s a little voice in his head that insists that Keith just didn’t want to stick around anymore. _But Shiro is here,_ he chastises himself. _Keith ALWAYS wants to stay near Shiro! It_ _’s his main defining characteristic!_

At the garrison, after a shitty start that fertilized a dozen rumors, Keith applied himself because he was a good pilot… but only after being taken under Shiro’s wing. Everyone could see that he found guidance and stability in Shiro. The moment Shiro was lost on Kerberos, he malfunctioned and got himself kicked out. This is common knowledge. 

Lance stands still in the middle of a hallway, halfway to nowhere, knocking his knuckles against his thigh. Shiro was gone, so Keith left. Shiro was lost—Keith was lost. Lost?

“ _I was kind of lost_ _… and found myself drawn out to this place._ ”

Hm. Lance doesn’t think about the night he spent in that shack in the desert very often, just like he doesn’t pursue honesty very often, but it looks like he’s doing both today. He skips over the part in the medical containment tent, skips over a ride on a probably-stolen hoverbike, skips over the restless night he spent going over every word Keith had said— _cargo pilot_ —and mimicking them in his head. He tunes back in when they’re standing in front of a massive corkboard covered in the detritus of a mind that spent nearly a year turning over every stone in search of _something_. 

“ _I was kind of lost_ _… I suppose that’s part of it_.”

When he left. He left. The Blades. The refugee mission. That tone…

Lance blinks, finding that he’s been staring at a wall for at least ten minutes now as his brain struggles to place the tone. He thinks he’s found it. Words might come sporadically to him, but body language? Non-verbal cues? He’s got those on lock. And the way Keith pulled back from Voltron, the way he talked about being adrift after Kerberos, those are one and the same.

It’s like Shiro was still missing. Oh, god. The air rushes out of him as he drags his hands down his cheeks, stretching his face and staring into nothing. _It_ _’s like Shiro is still missing_. How did he not see it before? Allura came to him to say that she couldn’t jive with Shiro anymore—Black wouldn’t take him back—Keith _pulled away_. 

_Keith does not pull away_. 

Well, it made sense in theory. It makes less sense when Keith finally gets back in contact and there is a woman at his side who looks strikingly similar to him. It’s all in the shape of the eyes, Lance thinks, in a daze. Everyone seems a little dazed.

“You found _who_?” he asks, for the third time. Maybe if he cleaned out his ears this morning before running out of the castle with his armor on top of his pajamas, he’d be able to understand what was going on. He’s too sleep deprived for this.

“My mother,” Keith says, for the third time. He’s got this dreamy sort of look to his eyes, like he’s been awake for so long that he’s not sure if he’s really awake anymore. Shiro is to Lance’s right, leaning close to the screen with obvious interest. The rest of Team Voltron sits in chairs nearby, watching like it’s a telenovela. 

Lance shakes his head, hard. He feels his cheeks flap against his skull, and when he stops, his eyesight is a little wonky. He blinks the dizziness away. 

Yeah, nope, she’s still there. He should NOT be admiring the cut of her jaw but he is, damnit, and he’s two seconds away from putting himself in time out.

She has a glare that rivals her son’s. Somehow, she makes it scarier. _Maybe_ , Lance thinks giddily, _it_ _’s because Keith was always a little bit on the defensive end of the violence spectrum_. This woman, as Galra as they come, has a vibe about her that makes it seem like she’s ready to gut you without hesitation.

Lance knows Keith well enough at this point to _hope_ that he would hesitate. Though sometimes, as a concept, it’s a little murky. Lubos comes to mind. And then another thing comes to mind. Something about Kolivan and Keith… the way they talked to each other… clashing over protocol, maybe… he doesn’t have time to think about it right now.

Shiro tilts his chin up, meeting Krolia’s eyes like Lance could not. “Kolivan told us you have information about a weapon. Is that true?”

She starts to speak about an obscene experiment at an obscure base and Lance tries not to wince too badly when Shiro presses a knuckle to his forehead. Headaches, again. Still. Always.

Lance glosses over the fact that there’s a weapon/monster thing on the horizon. There’s _always_ a weapon/monster thing on the horizon. He’s better with visuals, anyway—the Blades talk like they’re trying to make monotony seem cool. They finish the conversation and Shiro does not ask Keith if he’s okay, if he’s glad he found his mother. Lance doesn’t either, because he knows jack-shit about the entire situation and he’s not about to start now. Instead, he shoos the adulter of the adults away so he can have a moment alone with Keith, face to face, where he strikes a pose. “Miss me?” he asks, because come on, he’s been overthinking this for so long now that he could make it an Olympic sport. Everything is fine. Shiro got hit on the head one too many times and he’s suffering for it now and everything is fine because all they have to do is pop him in a healing pod.

There’s the dishonest Lance that he remembers. It’s been too long. He treasures the easy way the deceit unfurls across his brain like a tarp, covering every nasty truth he doesn’t want to see.

Only… something is still off. It’s in the set of Keith’s shoulders. He’s not an expert on Keith, kind of the opposite really, but Keith _looks_ at him in a way that Shiro doesn’t. Well, the Shiro who walks out of the command center when everyone disagrees with him, anyway. He’s not talking about the Shiro who stood with him in the hallway and admitted that he didn’t feel like himself. That Shiro is one who felt… well, real.

Realer.

“Lance. Still doing airshows?” Keith asks, and Lance snaps out of whatever the hell that was.

Lance… doesn’t say anything. It’s filler air and he knows Keith knows the answer is no and he doesn’t have a clue why they’re doing this. They look at each other. They blink.

“Is… is something wrong?” Keith asks, tentative now. Lance wants to bark a laugh. He’s been plotting Keith’s bowel movements trying to figure out the answer to that very same question, and here Keith is, casually asking like he’s not sure what’s going on either.

Screw this. It’s too hard. Keith was a Paladin of Voltron who left to find Lotor and stayed gone to find his family and now that both of those goals are complete he STILL looks like he’s lost. _Lost_. 

It can’t be all in Lance’s head. There is no way. Pulling a tarp over some immutable facts and pretending they’re unimportant is one thing, but watching as something alive, something _animated_ wriggles around underneath it all is quite different. Honesty, dishonesty, he doesn’t know what those words mean when you’re in space and memories are trade items and Jesus Christ he’s never wanted to go home as badly as he does right now.

So he locks eyes with Keith, and the words that come out of his mouth are, “Do you ever feel like something is missing but you can’t put your finger on what it is?”

Keith’s head tilts to one side, his eyes trailing toward the door his mother walked out of. Lance almost bites off his tongue. Keith is trying to build a bridge to his estranged alien mother, of COURSE he feels like that. Trying to forge a familial bond from luxite is the epitome of _something missing_.

Only… he doesn’t say that. “When Blue was calling to me out in the desert, I had no idea what or where she was. When the only clear thought you have is _search_ , everything kind of feels that way.”

“So, it’s better now?” Lance questions, leaning forward. Is he… are they… is this progress being made?

Keith rubs a knuckle across his sternum. “Uh. I guess so.”

Lance doesn’t believe that for a minute. 

For all that everyone ragged on Keith constantly for always leaving them one lion short, Lance is finding that it’s a very common theme these days. From the time Shiro took the Black Lion into the middle of a Galra coronation ceremony (complete with bloodshed, as is the Galra way) to now, the team has been split more often than not. 

Lance takes Red to Galra Central Command and lets himself in the front door. An open-door policy was one of the negotiations made to Lotor once Lotor took the throne, so he smiles at the guards and waltzes inside. He salutes the memory of their old escort sentry, gone too soon. They’ve synced up most of the Galra records to the castle by now, daunting though it was, but Lance knows there are things that cannot be translated into binary. 

“Where were you, man?” Hunk asks as he’s on his way back. He doesn’t answer right away, still trying to scrub goose-bumps from his skin. That witch, man… her lair is freaky. He wonders if she still haunts it. 

The good news is that he got what he came for. The bad news is that he… has no idea what it means. He wants to tell Hunk, but he’s still operating on nothing more than the itchiest hunch in the history of the universe and he doesn’t even know how to say what he _thinks_ is happening. Coran’s incredulous laugh is replaying in his head. He gives Hunk a basket of stolen rations and holes himself up in his room.

This is the moment where he wishes he had Keith. Keith has a way with things—he touches them and they do as he says. Sure, maybe it’s partly the Galra blood and the fact that if Lance didn’t personally see Keith flying head-over-heels out an airlock when he first tried to bond with Red then it didn’t happen, but Keith just seems imbued with the power of ‘do’—he is in motion and the world folds around him.

Okay, so maybe Lance has a few people up on a few pedestals and it’s throwing his life out of balance to see two of them tottering at the same time. And look, it’s not like… he’s not upset, really, by the fact that Keith was a better Red Paladin, because Lance was a better aerial dancer and it’s all subjective anyway. But still, as he stares at the recording device in his hand, he wishes he didn’t have to do this by himself.

It turns out the big button in the middle is the play button. Who could have guessed?

For torture, it sure is monotonous. He’s guessing the chip is from a sentry’s voice box because that’s the only thing that’s really clear. It’s noting experiment numbers and repeating phrases that someone, likely Haggar, is dictating to it. In the background, there are sounds that might be mechanical drills or might be screams, but they rattle so much in the sentry’s head that it’s hard to say.

After everything, Lance feels like he’s still two steps short of where he needs to be. This is a lead, definitely, but… it’s leading him straight into a brick wall. Is it Alice in Wonderland who opens a door only to find that it’s bricked over? That seems like a Wonderland sort of thing, but he mixed up a lot of books when he was younger. He just couldn’t keep the words straight.

All he knows is that there’s no trace of Operation Kuron in official Galra records.

Not for the first time, Lance is imagining the expanse of the desert. He thinks, two years after Keith’s time out there came and went, that he finally understands what it was like. He can’t believe that he’s still finding traces of Keith to follow. He can’t believe how numb his fingers are.

They put Shiro in a pod this morning when the low-grade migraine he’s had since his rescue turned into something like a seizure. Lance thinks that when he asks, later tonight, when it’s just the two of them, Shiro will tell him that it was like his body was trying to move without his control. “You don’t have to worry, man, we have your back,” Lance will say in response, and they’ll put it off until the next episode. Or the next. Or the next. Because while everyone notices, no one knows, and Lance just wants to lighten the weight of uncertainty.

He wonders if that is a lie, too.

He’s selling himself short, though. That’s something he can freely admit. The Altean broadsword has started to leave callouses on his palms and he tucked Red into a barrel roll far tighter than anything he’s ever achieved before and the garrison simulators are so far in his rear-view mirror that he can hardly see them anymore. He is a _good_ right-hand man. Even if he failed to keep Keith here, even if he didn’t notice how much Keith was struggling both before and after Shiro came back (notice? did he say notice? he meant react to) he’s sure noticing now. He buffers Shiro from the team and the team from Shiro and sometimes it even feels like he knows what he’s doing.

This is the first time that he seeks Keith out. It’s on the pretense of a sword battle.

That’s what he tells Keith, anyway. He tells him that he’s tired of getting his ass kicked by Lotor and that you can only playfully bop a droid on the nose so many times before it learns what you’re doing and jams two of your fingers with a headbutt. Not one of his finer moments.

He’s lucky that he manages to catch Keith. Voltron has been at a near standstill, waiting on whatever supplies that Allura needs specially crafted to test a theory about the rift, and they’ve started to do that _thing_ again where four lions go out and four lions come back in and they never quite manage to form Voltron because it’s never quite dire enough to ask Allura to come with. Keith, meanwhile, is fighting tooth and nail to track down every use of the quintessence that creates the living beyblades. (It is at this point that Lance just snorts and goes along with the words, even though he knows they’re wrong. Who cares what they really mean. Beyblade, robeast, chimera—everyone knows what he’s trying to say.)

Keith’s mom is a whole other issue. No one talks about that.

“Widen your stance,” Keith instructs. Lance locks eyes with him and sinks into the splits. He doesn’t know what he wants, hasn’t for a while. The desire to go home has started to war with this idea that he will never be able to explain what happened out here. That he’s turning into an outsider even as he washes his face in the mirror. His lines are too hard—he doesn’t have an ounce of give anymore. 

Keith… Lance sighs. He doesn’t want to think it, but Keith has always been a little bit like that. Lance pretends it’s the hair that gives him away even from thirty paces, but really? It’s always been the set of his shoulders. The way his jaw locks when he tilts his chin down, staring defiantly up at someone taller, meaner, stronger.

This time, though, Keith laughs. He braces his hands on his knees and he _melts_ , his face cracking right in two. Lance whines and grabs hold of his stupid ninja hood to haul himself back to his feet, but for the first time ever Keith gives way under his grasp and then they’re both lying there, side by side, staring up at the ceiling. 

“Screw your stance, you suck,” Lance says, and maybe he deserves the elbow to the stomach. But maybe he also deserves the favor he asks when they part ways. He hands the recorder over to Keith and asks him to dig up any information he can on Project Kuron, and Keith looks at it like he looked at the corkboard and the lion carvings and _some arrival happening last night_ _… then you showed up_.

For the first time in a long time, Keith looks like he isn’t trying to shunt aside some desperate urge that he can’t follow through. He looks like he is right where he needs to be, no desire to distance himself and just exist somewhere else. Pieces fall into place.

And then, just like that, they all come tumbling down. Or, at least… this is how Lance imagines they would. He’s having trouble separating himself from a thousand alternate realities that Slav has cooked up for him (or for himself, but no one really seems to know why he does it when it distresses him so much). 

(Actually, scratch that, Lance is starting to get an idea.)

Keith has a habit of flying stolen Galra cruisers. That day, it’s a miracle they don’t shoot him out of the sky. As it turns out, maybe it would have been kinder if they did. One step inside the door he locks eyes with Shiro and something _snaps_.

They don’t know how long he’s been awake. They don’t know where he’s been. Kolivan reported him AWOL three weeks ago. When you count backwards, that date coincides with the day you would have if you took their sparring session and added the time it might take to find someone willing to screw around with an audio file.

It is only now that Lance recalls the fact that he and Keith are fundamentally different. It doesn’t matter how many strange coincidental overlaps their lives have, Keith functions at a pace that Lance doesn’t understand. Breaks? What are those? He is a slave to a mind with a single track. Lance has seen it so many times now that it’s just another thing in a catalogue of things that he knows. An entry that has since lost the red flag: _Keith doesn_ _’t know how to pause for breath. He does not know when to pull back. He is Galra through and through because he will_ die _before he lets himself stop._ Lance curses himself for forgetting that a Keith who is lost (though Keith always seems to be lost) does not have the self-control to NOT tear apart heaven and hell alike searching for that which can bring peace to his buzzing mind. 

Keith aims his blade at Shiro and his hands shake and Lance nearly laughs out loud.

There isn’t really an altercation. It’s much simpler than Lance wants to admit. It goes like this: Shiro has another seizure. They put him in a pod. Keith throws a data stick down on the table, says one word—“ _Lance_ _”_ —in a choked voice, and then goes to stand in the cryo-replenisher room to take watch so they don’t see him cry. They still hear him, though.

So, the contents of the data stick. It’s… well. Lance sits back at his console in the command center and watches video from Keith’s mask as he dives into a hallway full of rooms and a room full of pods and each of the pods have a half-formed figure of the Black Paladin, _their_ Black Paladin, the one who is suspended in frozen jelly just down the way.

Naxzela feels like nothing compared to the way Keith tore the place apart until he himself was being held together by nothing but the pressure of the universe around him.

By the time they trace the trail of Kuron back to its barest, most elementary parts they have realized the damage a sleeper agent can cause. They have to reconfigure all the biometric locks on the castle. They have to lock down the Black Lion in her hangar. Keith sleeps for two days straight and then slips through their fingers and by the time they find him again he is mechanically banging his head against the wall of a cell and the Witch is the puppeteer holding the strings he’s trying to use to strangle himself.

It only gets worse from there.

It’s like a waking nightmare. Shiro—Kuron—the clone, whoever he is, has enough of Shiro in him that he shakes himself apart the moment they let him out of the pod. He never wanted to hurt them. Space doesn’t do burials, but it does do funerals, and they send him into the vacuum to the tune of a crystal coffin, ringing and ringing and ringing. Too much damage has been done. 

Too much, too much, Lance imagines staring at his own face in the mirror and watching his jaw unhinge, Allura sitting in an empty room with her hands hanging off the sides of her chair, limp and empty, Hunk pulling Pidge into a hug only to have her dissolve and slip through his fingers. Shiro’s face is always at their periphery, so many of him that he never seems to cease. Mind control is a hell of a drug, and there are times when he splits apart at the seams because Haggar is the one calling the shots but she doesn’t know what she wants doesn’t know what she wants doesn’t know what she wants—

So, in the end… Lance chickens out. Of the favor, he means. He never gives the recorder to Keith. He doesn’t know if Keith’s face would really light up at the prospect of having something to work toward, or if he would consequently work himself into a fugue state chasing down the reality of Project Kuron. He doesn’t know if Shiro is really Shiro anymore, but he also doesn’t know that the seizures are anything but actual seizures (and here he notes that Pidge found quite a lot of information on abnormal brain activity, and honestly, some of it makes his skin crawl almost as bad as Haggar does). He doesn’t know. _He doesn_ _’t know_.

He sits on the floor of his room and listens to the Game Over music of _Killbot Phantasm IV_ repeat over and over and over and he wants to put his brain on an ironing board and just _fffffffffpt_! It’s bad. It’s really bad. One sparring session with Keith and he’s in a place of complete and utter indecision the likes of which he’s never seen before. He scours his mind, trying to find an answer, and now it’s Shiro’s voice echoing in his head. Nothing really of use, just a thousand iterations of _go team!_ and _form Voltron!_ He is, frankly, miserable.

He steals Lotor away from Allura during breakfast the next day because he’s too far into his own head and Lucifer might have been evil but he definitely had a way with words. Lance could deal with being kinder to the new Emperor, considering he’s on their side, but he’s still stuck in red fog with the Black Lion and – _followed him right into this trap_. He’ll be kind when it comes easy to him. When he forgets why his hackles rise.

It’s now that he realizes that somewhere along the line, he did exactly that with Keith. Huh. Cool. Hope it sticks.

Lotor is not as much help as he had hoped he’d be. “Don’t you know anything?” Lance snaps, but the royal figure in front of him was born to withstand more than a few feeble sparks.

“I know that the witch is a vile creature who has no conscience. Her mind is a place where reason and logic go to die. She spreads poison everywhere she turns, and most of all, she is the reason I am who I am today, because without her _guidance_ I would never have realized how sick my father’s empire really was.”

Lotor seems particularly on edge today and Lance doesn’t know why until he hears Allura and Coran talking when he really shouldn’t. He plays a letter game with the name Honerva, changing one letter at a time until he reaches Haggar, and he kind of wants to laugh. Then he decides that he would heartily maim for a guitar right now. He doesn’t play, but he feels like there would be something poetic and cathartic about smashing it over his own head.

The next day, Lotor is more resigned about it all. “You know,” he says, perched on a dining hall chair that seems meek in the presence of a Galra, even a half-blood. “I never did get a full conversation with your Black Paladin.”

“You talk to Shiro all the time,” Lance mutters, giving him the stink eye. He hates the fact that Lotor is small for a Galra and still commands so much space. The headroom he requires alone is enough space to house three of Lance.

“I wasn’t talking about Shiro,” Lotor says. A cup of mystery juice that Lance hasn’t seen anyone but him drink is in his hand. He raises it to his lips with the quirk of an eyebrow. “Keith, was it? He took out the last piece of the mammoth teleduv by using my own shot against me. Quite relentless, really, I’m surprised he never came by.”

Lance does not have words for that. He often finds himself short on words, and he’s gotten good at improvising, but how do you express a lump in your throat?

Lotor eyes him, head tilted just slightly. “He’s intuitive. He moves on instincts. What does he have to say about Project Kuron?”

“I don’t know,” Lance mumbles, and then again louder when Lotor’s brow raises another half a centimeter. This is uncharted territory. There are no footsteps to follow here. He didn’t actually know that Keith never talked to Lotor—the guy stood guard over him enough times that everyone just assumed it happened, bad blood under the bridge or whatever. What’s the saying about assumptions?

A heavy sigh. Lotor leans forward, locking eyes with him seriously for the first time today. The former Prince is undoubtedly hiding some fraction of what he knows but all the same, Lance leans forward to listen. Bits and pieces are better than a void, probably. 

“Haggar is a trickster who messes with the mind. What she cannot do is hack an instinct. She’s a surface dweller—she cannot change who you really are deep down, what truly makes you _you_.”

If you had once told him that the son of Haggar and Zarkon had a proclivity toward poetry, Lance would have told you to go suck a grapefruit. As it is, he nearly scoffs in Lotor’s face. Maybe it’s less the words belonging on a fancy card in curlicue script that he hates and more that it all hinges on _truth_ , but still, he goes to bed for the first time in days with something of a proper plan formulating in his head. He has Lotor to blame.

Truth number one: Lance, Paladin of the Blue and Red Lions, is into women.

Truth number two: Lance, Paladin of the Blue and Red Lions, is not _only_ into women.

Truth number three: Lance, Paladin of the Blue and Red Lions, Purple Paladin if you will, knows he’s a coward at heart. He’s a lover, not a fighter.

Truth number four: cowardice doesn’t make a difference when you have a friend who is more than willing to drag you directly into whatever situation you’re trying to avoid. See: Keith.

He counts the truths on his fingers. Forwards, backwards, sideways. Tries to add more—but who the hell is he kidding? Truth is so subjective. What if he claims that he trusts Keith but it turns out that somewhere deep inside he’s buried a deep dark secret and he can’t trust _anyone_ with it? Truths don’t work in theoreticals. He couldn’t even tell you his favorite shampoo scent if a gun were pointed at his head because hell, the likelihood that he can actually remember every shampoo he’s ever smelled and rank them best to worst is _zip_. Wait, no, forget the gun—there’s no way that’s how the saying goes. 

Truth number five: can’t think of another truth for the life of him?

No, no no no. That one instantly invalidates itself. God, he’s awful at this. Oh! Wait, that one might work!

Maybe he’s stalling. Yeah… yeah he thinks he might be. He takes the recorder and marches down the hall to Pidge’s room, letting himself in before he’s even finished knocking. He can’t put this off any longer. Truth: if anyone can get anything useful off this damn chip, it’s Katie ‘Pidge’ Holt. Truth: he _needs_ information. Truth: he’s officially more scared of what will happen if he doesn’t act than what will happen if he does. 

He wonders, as he waits for Pidge to work a miracle, if Keith can still handle a bayard despite being worlds away from any lions for months upon months now. He’s seen some incredible things—if Zarkon could do it, he’s pretty sure that Keith has the moxie. And then there’s Lotor—never piloted a lion once in his stupidly long lifespan, and yet the black bayard came to life beneath his claws. Lance nearly scoffs _Galra_ before he realizes: Keith. 

Keith is deep in empire territory that is still in disarray after the utter fuck of the Kral Zera ceremony. Last he heard was a day or so ago, when Kolivan asked for Lotor’s assistance with information on commander somebody-or-other. 

Suddenly mortification rises. He _keeps fucking forgetting_ that Keith isn’t right around the corner! At this point Keith’s been away longer than he’s been close by. That’s a knee to the gut—he is so bent out of shape about this kid that he can’t let go of a ghost that’s not even there. Incredible.

The alarms go off and the entire time Lance has his head forcibly cocked to one side, daring himself to expect that voice in his ear. For the first time in a while, he pushes too hard at Red’s controls and nearly takes the skin off the Black Lion. His apologies are brushes off by Shiro’s gently encouraging voice—and Shiro has no reason to be either of those things, but he is, and his face is becoming gaunt under his helm and they need this over with.

They need their Shiro. Keith needs him, Pidge needs him, Hunk needs him.

Lance could probably survive, but that’s only because, re: truth number two, he can always find someone new to fill the void.

He never meant to get so angsty. Pidge called it his ‘langst’ once upon a time, and the way she said it implied that it was mostly performative, which it is. Introspection is hard—improv is easy. The funny thing is, though, that the persona makes him feel better than his truth pills do any day. It’s a hard knock life for Lance.

Shiro has started having blow-outs. Blow-ups? Explosions. Lash outs. He’s fine for hours at a time, and then, out of nowhere, he yells and screams and more than once Allura has had to pin him down until he calms. Progress with the recorder is slow, and not for the first time, Lance wishes he’d had the _cojones_ to shove it off on someone else sooner. Why did he insist on keeping the weight of it on his own shoulders? Seems kind of backwards, now, especially considering he’s the least qualified to help.

Well, except for emotional support. He’s quickly climbed to the number one Shiro-visitor-list slot, taking him on walks around the castle like he’s an old man in a retirement home who just wants to spend time with his grandchildren.

They manage to gather some of the chatter in the background of the Kuron tape (KuronGate) and what they learn is um… not good. 

This is the same time that all of Lance’s worst nightmares come true. The worst reality has come to pass.

Okay, okay, that’s an exaggeration. What happens is Keith comes across a Shiro clone out in the wild. Meanwhile, in the castle, they’ve learned that the powerful Altean quintessence manipulation techniques that Allura has been using are causing background radiation that is known to eat away at naturally existing quintessence. It’s actually a relief to know that they’re all a little sick, not just Shiro (or whoever that guy is), but the fact is that it’s hitting Shiro (Kuron?) harder than the rest of them because whatever Project Kuron does, whatever it creates, only leaves behind the bare minimum of NEQ (a scientific term, even though Lance can’t shake the idea of nesquik now).

Shiro is losing what he can’t afford to lose, is the baseline. They pack him away in a cryopod to figure out what to do about it. And now there is another ‘Shiro’ on the way, carefully handcuffed in the back of a Blade transport shuttle, who is soon going to be exposed to the utter MESS that is the castle right now. Lotor is less than happy that they have to stop their work, work being a subjective term seeing as no one but Allura has the means to _do_ any of it, but he’s just going to have to deal with it because the Empire might be in shambles but Team Voltron is just as bad and if Lance had to pick one or the other, he’d go Voltron all the way.

When the shuttle docks, Keith is in a daze. It’s like how he was after Krolia’s reappearance, only worse, and Lance worries for his sense of object permanency. So many people have disappeared from his life, and the ones who come back are so changed and/or unstable… it’s not healthy to live your life expecting that everyone around you is going to somehow slip out of your hands no matter how tight you hold, how close you keep your eye. When your mom abandons you and comes back literally alien, it’s probably a good idea to look into space therapists.

Lance understands a little more now why Keith seemed unbreakable when they first met, during their first year at garrison training. It wasn’t a good thing—it wasn’t a boon. It had to do with having life repeatedly break him until he was forced to either stand tall or succumb.

He really, really hopes Keith isn’t succumbing now. He feels like he’s finally getting what makes Keith tick. It would be a downright tragedy to finally understand only to watch it all fall down, down, down.

“I knew he wasn’t coming back,” Keith slurs into his eighth glass of fermented nunville. He’s nearly lying on the table, his normally straight back bent in a nice, gentle curve as Hunk rubs a hand slowly up and down his spine. “Knew it… I knew it.”

“You knew no such anything,” Lance slurs right back. He’s decided to fuck tradition—he and Keith are getting drunk at the same damn time. No delays, no challenges, no prophecies. Like friends. If drinking Altean hair tonic is what it takes, then so be it.

“Did, though,” Keith says. “People only—only come back from the dead once, Lance.”

That sounds like bologna, or maybe some other heavily processed meat product. Lance tries to explain this, explain how Shiro was never _actually_ dead. To be presumed dead is a whole different thing.

In the time it takes for him to sort out all the words he wants to say, Keith starts crying. Now, let’s be clear—Keith, Paladin of the Red and Black Lions (the Maroon Paladin if you will) and Blade of Marmora, does NOT cry. It’s another one of those _things_ ; Hunk insists that Keith cried during a vlog once and that he saw it while snooping, but if Lance did not see it himself it most certainly did _not_ happen.

Frankly speaking, now that he’s seeing it, he can safely say that he’s never seen anything more horrible in his life. It’s so awful that he has to go over there and haul Keith up by the waist to hold the boy’s face to his chest, wrapping his arms around not-quite-slim shoulders and rocking back and forth.

Lost—yeah, that’s the mood of the evening. The month. The year. Their _lives_.

It’s quite eerie to walk into the prisoner containment unit and find… Shiro. One of them, in any case. He’s an odd one—he had a blindfold on when they found him, and he doesn’t like to hear proper nouns, if the way he starts humming loudly is any indicator.

After Keith is done throwing up, and Lance has forced them both to choke down a few slices of space bread, Lance leads him inside the PCU (pchooooo!) to go meet the guy officially. 

“I was the one that broke,” this Shiro says. They need a naming system for them. Shiro-1. Shiro-2. Ground-Shiro. Haha, get it? Ground-zero?

Keith doesn’t think it’s funny, but you know what, screw his hungover ass.

“What does that mean, broke?” Keith asks. His face is pale and pinched, especially under the glow of the containment unit.

The Shiro (yeah… this one is definitely going to be Shiro 3.0) doesn’t say anything. What he does instead baffles Lance for a long moment. With one hand, he reaches for the side of the tank, tapping a rhythm.

“Oh,” Keith breathes, and Lance really does not get it until he’s dragged into the hall and Keith, vibrating in his boots, tells him that _it_ _’s morse code, dipshit, didn’t the garrison teach you that_? He’s sure it did, but he always had a hard time with English, much less with translating a bunch of little dots into letters into English. 

This is a revelation. Haggar uses them like her eyes and ears, Shiro 3.0 says—they’re infiltration, sleeper agents. She only meant for one of them to get free so she could follow him into Voltron like a snake, but when the Empire fell she fell out of favor with a lot of the people who used to tremble beneath her. Not all of them, of course—but Lotor’s old generals (minus Narti, and didn’t Lance say Lotor probably knew some shit? he hardcore called that) were going to be executed before she pardoned and recruited them. They had no other choice.

Her experiments, too many of them to count, have mostly been destroyed. The coffins of robeasts that were half-formed float in space, giant obelisks of supernatural decay. But Project Kuron… well, that one was still running, the clones kept in line by Haggar’s magic alone when all her minions fled.

He broke, he says, when Haggar’s magic was finally stretched too thin. Between the clones and Sendak and—here he falters. He’s still afraid. Haggar does not understand morse, but she can still hear the taps of his fingers, and he’s perpetually terrified of the day Haggar breaks the code.

They get it out of him in bits and pieces. A code inside a code. _Greek mythology_ , his fingers say. _Daughter of Echidna_. 

This, for the first time in forever, is something Lance understands. Listen, he didn’t read much as a kid, but he _loved_ Percy Jackson. A bunch of kids with ADHD who can’t read very well but turn out to be the children of gods and shit? That is the coolest thing nine-year-old Lance had EVER heard of. He read those books cover to cover enough times that he could parrot Greek family trees like whoa. 

Especially the monsters.

Echidna was the mother of all monsters, but notable among them were Cerberus, big fuzzy guard of Hades; the Hydra, angry serpent with a mouth kink; Medusa, angry snake lady with a statue kink; and the Chimera.

Hm. Chimera. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

They gather everyone in the cryo-chamber and to talk about what to do. They have no Voltron, not with Shiro 2.0 still in cryosleep. They hardly have it anyway, not with the devotion Allura is showing to her Alchemy. Voltron has become a juggling act that never reaches the finale. Blue picked up a slew of new Paladins—Matt, Hunk, Olia, Krolia, even Lotor. She is patient, offers guidance, but she, like the rest of them, still paces back and forth while they argue about how to fix this. All of this. The Rift and the monster wreaking havoc and the colors on their armor. 

In frustration, Pidge asks why they didn’t take out the quintessence refineries that made the quintessence that made the monsters. Lance glances over at Keith and finds him staring up into the face of the man asleep and frozen in front of them. “Keith wanted to,” Lance says. He is as honest as he has ever been, eyes locked on Keith the same way that Keith is locked on Shiro, and that’s surely a metaphor for something. “He and Shiro 2.0 fought about it before he left.”

It’s not even a revelation at this point. They all know by now that the earliest warning sign of _all of this_ was Keith. Keith was the divining rod that pointed them straight to Blue. Keith was their compass needle. Keith was a spike in white blood cells running through the veins of Voltron, reacting to something unseen and malicious in the body. He was triggered by the first sign that something was going wrong, working on the barest whim, the presence of the malignancy so understated that it seemed like a false positive to everyone else involved. In retrospect, Lance finds it all so _obvious_. They should have paid attention. 

Keith only gives a half-shrug at the acknowledgment. “It’s not like I knew why it mattered so much,” he says, nonchalant. Lance’s mouth drops open. It’s like he doesn’t know that every move he makes is like a beacon on a dark night, telegraphing to everyone within eyeshot which way to walk. It’s like he doesn’t even realize that his path is branded across Lance’s future, always prompting him to keep moving, keep fighting, like it was preordained.

How could he _possibly_ not know that?

A side effect of repressing things until they’re buried prematurely in a coffin of make-believe is that Lance does not often seek out _any_ truth. If you think he’s bad at knowing himself, whoo boy, you should see him fighting off any knowledge of the people around him. He keeps coming back to Keith, over and over again, but maybe it’s no wonder why—after all, it’s his own bald assumptions and insistence that Keith cram himself into a mold he doesn’t fit that brought them to this point.

He was one of the main forces that drove Keith away. Truth. The most intrepid truth he’s uncovered yet. Loner? Keith? It’s actually laughable. Keith tried _so hard_ just to hold them together. He had Shiro’s past guidance, but that past guidance was not nearly enough practical social skill to do it effectively at all, which was why it was so easy to assume that Keith could not care for anyone but Shiro. _You can_ _’t leave.—Everyone in the universe has a family!—I cradled you in my arms—Leave the math to Pidge_. 

If Lance had paid any attention to the pattern, he would have seen how wrong things were when Keith left.

So now, he’s beating himself up about it. Normal nighttime routines, you know how it is. He’s glad he figured it out eventually, that aha moment in a random hallway one afternoon where he realized that Keith doesn’t pull back except when there’s nothing to hold him steady. But still.

 _Still_. He covers his eyes with his hands, leaning into Kaltenecker’s side. He hasn’t seen the space mice in a long time now and he wonders if they’re okay, or if, while no one was watching, they slowly withered into nothingness just like Shiro 2.0 is. That was how Keith went. Little bits of him rubbed away, his sure feet slipping, until he had to get away or risk never being whole again.

Shiro was missing, for the second time, the third time, gone even when he stood right in front of them. It must have hurt worse than anything Lance knows to ache for something literally in your grasp and have no words to contextualize the loss except as an urge, a need, to distance yourself and be _somewhere else_. He hopes that’s not what it’s going to feel like when he returns to his own family. He hates that just judging by how his life runs in parallel to Keith’s, two steps behind, that’s exactly what will happen.

He steals a breath and stands up, patting the cow on the head on his way out. He goes to visit Shiro—first one, then the other. 

It will only be another day or so before Shiro 2.0 comes out of the pod, hopefully with quintessence levels regulated. They’ll have to figure out something to do about his eyes and ears, their link to Haggar—a training helmet, maybe. Lance stares and rubs his own shoulder, thinking about the times that Shiro reached out to him. _Right to him_ —stretching out with fingers extended, calling his name. 

He doesn’t know where he stands with the real Shiro, wherever he is, but he likes to think he was making progress with this one. And he… he misses him. Even though he has to assume that the witch has seen everything this Shiro’s eyes have laid upon, he still wants to sit down and talk and _fix things_. 

The other Shiro, Shiro 3.0, is restless just like him. Lance is getting a lot better with morse code now that they’ve left a nifty cheat sheet on the outside of the tank, so with his mouth he talks about the color pink (wild about that Altean mourning thing right?) and intersperses the conversation with tap-taps on the wall. He’s not sure what kind of info he’s looking for. Shiro 3.0 is seriously weird. He’s always talking in circles, trying to make points without giving information away, and when Lance asks him why for the first time he goes frighteningly still and just taps out - .... .. .-. - -.-- -....- ..-. --- ..- .-. / -.. . .- -.. which is ominous as all hell. Thirty-four dead?! Thirty-four dead _what_?! Thirty-four dead _who_?! 

Lance wonders if Keith has a clearer understanding of that answer. It’s unlikely, because Keith and 3.0 aren’t getting along very well. Keith won’t even announce his presence—he just comes in without a word to tap out a question or two, gathers the response, and walks away again. But hey, Shiro, any Shiro, is a smart man. If Shiro can’t tell the sound of Keith’s footsteps, Lance will eat his left shoe. _Enthusiastically_. And if, just if, Shiro wanted to talk about thirty-four dead? It would be with Keith.

Maybe it’s time to leave Shiro 3.0 be for the night. Lance knocks a little melody on the glass to indicate that he’s on his way out, with a promise to bring over some better food next time. He trips just outside the door. When he looks down, he’s not expecting Keith to be down there, drooping head propped on a palm to give him a scathing look. He’s holding a tablet with an auto-scrolling list of coalition news.

Lance sits next to him and prods him in the side until he hands it over. The only headline that means anything to Lance is one from the aliens-who-look-like-orange-squirrels quadrant, the whatchamacallit. He can’t remember the right series of clicks to pronounce the name.

The monster, Haggar’s personal monster, is starting to raise heads. Axca has been spotted at a hospital near there, after an ‘incident’—she was visiting another one of Lotor’s previous babes, the one with the wind sock for a head.

“I keep expecting to wake up and find that this is all a dream,” Keith says, blinking heavy eyes.

Lance turns up a nose, rubbing his hand through his hair. “What the hell kind of dreams are you having?” he asks, and really means something more like _yeah_. _Me too_.

“We’re fractured,” Allura says. She has both palms pressed against the table. All the Paladins are here, even Shiro 2.0, plus representatives from the Blades, the Rebels, Lotor’s Empire. This is a ploy. They’re going to try and trick Haggar and counterstrike her monster when she’s not expecting it. Meanwhile… if all goes well… they’re going to try to talk to _Shiro_ Shiro. 

Still, Lance is a little alarmed to find that he can’t see any hints of insincerity in Allura’s tone. Is that what she actually thinks? Maybe they have been a bit distant or whatever but why does she have that tone? See, something like that being on Lance’s mind is one thing because he has a sordid history of putting things in places they don’t belong. For example: jealous of Keith? Put the onus on Keith’s head. Simple. Not even he himself had to acknowledge the truth.

But the way she says it… _It's me. It's been me all along_. Taking the blame. He almost wants to sigh. How is it that she always feels like the weight of the world is on her shoulders?

But then again… monstrous creatures large enough to subsume the quintessence from entire galaxies at a time have come up just beneath their radar.

That had been two days ago.

And the news of quadrants falling into disarray under Lotor’s reign, while the Emperor focused everything he had in him on the rift.

That had been two days ago.

And Keith, Keith, his lips raw and chapped as he stared at Lance, as if Lance’s story about a Shiro in the space between spaces was a literal lance to the gut.

That had been two days ago, too.

Nothing is right. Nothing is right. It’s official. They are in the Alternate Reality that exists solely to bum everyone the fuck out.

The plan comes to fruition soon enough, but never soon _enough_. The most surprising part, Lance finds, is Black and the longing she casts toward Keith. Lance can’t hear her words, not like he can with Blue or even Red, but as he sits in her cockpit she’s able to bring up camera footage that Lance had no idea was stored inside her. Cuts of each of them, sitting in her cockpit, trying to raise her from a death-like drop to the hangar floor, where she had laid for weeks as Keith searched. Lance winces a laugh to see his own face, bent in concentration. But then… Keith.

Keith begging her not to come to life for him, telling her that _Shiro_ is the one true Black Paladin. Whispering that he’ll bring Shiro to her so she doesn’t have to force a connection to him, the black sheep, the Galra. Talking to Shiro through Black’s chilly cockpit, as if he understood instinctively what it took them nearly a year to parse from scraps of intel and broken clones. 

She pitied him, Lance surmises. The hole in his chest was similar to her own, but for a creature so small… made of so much flesh and bone… it must have hurt a whole lot worse. He looks so small on the screen, his head bowed. Lance thinks that this is perhaps the first time he’s ever been glad to follow behind Keith—to pick up a burden that Keith would not carry. Keith can insist that he’s not their leader because he’s inferior all he wants, but in the end, Lance is pretty sure he made the right decision when he pulled back to protect his heart. Keith, half-Galra half-human, the Paladin of the Red and Black Lions, Blade of Marmora, deserves a chance to heal.

He grips the bayard and rotates it in the slot, ignoring the grind of bones inside of him. This better work. It just… it better. 

When he’s not sure if he can press on any further, he gives the signal to the others. All at once Voltron lights up—Allura pumps magic into every crevice in the giant robot. Keith is counting under his breath, a repeating pattern, as the rest of the bayards click into place. Lance closes his eyes and _pushes_. Like a contraction, like a force of nature. He slides into the in-between space one knuckle at a time, inch by inch. _Please_ , he whispers to Black. _Please let me through._

She does. 

It takes all of them. All of voltron and all of the paladins, every pilot that Blue has ever taken. It takes all of them, but when Lance reaches in and takes Shiro’s hand and _pulls_ … bracing his feet against the panels of the Black Lion and _yanking with all his might_ … it’s like the stars begin to shift, as if the planets have come into alignment.

He feels, for the first time in a long time, like he’s not stepping carefully into the footsteps of someone else who walked before him, never quite filling them right. There is no path, just a light—and the light shines from inside himself—glowing and shimmering like a beacon from between his own ribs—and he grits and pulls and yanks and slowly, so slowly, he feels the tether holding Shiro in the upside-down, the space in between spaces, the psychic plane begin to stretch, and then fray, and then _snap_.

They land in a heap on the floor, the two of them all in a jumble. Shiro, exactly the same as the day they lost him during that fight with Zarkon so long ago—and Lance, older and wiser and more grateful than he thinks he’s ever been, in his entire goddamn life. The hum of Allura’s magic simmers and pops all around them as she lets go, and then Voltron is coming apart and the Lions are docking again and Lance knows, in the way he’s come to know Keith not as a prophecy or as a silhouette in the distance but as a friend, that the red paladin is running, running, running toward them.

It’s not finished, the war is not over. This isn’t a miracle fix for the vast aches of the universe. But it’s something. It’s something. A start, a beginning. A hug. A truth. A friend, a paladin, an alternate reality, a branch, a light, a love—a story.

And Lance… well. He’s glad that this is the one he’s told.

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me what you think!


End file.
